Soon
by MaddyCain
Summary: The most effective torture device is the pain of a loved one. CDG. Warning: Dark, but hopeful.


**Warning: THIS IS A DARK STORY. There are references to torture and rape, although neither of the above occur onscreen. It is a story about who sees you when you are broken, and how you move past it. It is not remotely fluffy, although it does have a hopeful ending.**

**Author's Note:** This story has absolutely no connection to "The Consort" or its upcoming sequel. Got that? NO. CONNECTION. It was just a plot bunny I got and banged out. "The Heir" is coming along fabulously and I'm eager to release it when it's done. Meanwhile, have some ANGST.

* * *

Eight years was a long time to watch

Eight years was a long time to watch. It was an even longer time to wait.

Neither of them lived celibate lives. She became seriously involved with the Mayor's son about a year after the Eclipse. Then she was engaged for a time to the young Earl from the south. After he left her, she dated a series of young men. Sons of Central City's elite and working men alike. She created a sensation by dating one of the palace guards. She liked that.

It took him longer to rejoin the dating life. He was eased into it when he reconnected with the widow of an old friend from before the Possession. She moved into his quarters in the Palace for a time. Then, she moved out again. He met a musician, a cellist with the Central City Symphony. After her, the older sister of one of the Tin Men under his command.

These people, most of whom did not know each other and never would, could have formed a club and shared their too-similar experiences. What it is to love someone and be loved by them, and yet feel secondary. What is it to be a placeholder, until what is meant to be gets around to being.

"It'll happen eventually," their families said. "This can't go on forever," their friends reassured each other. "Let them find each other in their own time. We shouldn't intervene," they all agreed.

And so no one did. And it didn't happen. And it went on forever.

* * *

The day they go missing, he is accompanying her to the mountains, where she is to attend the dedication of a memorial to dead miners. He has offered to go because she is between companions, as is he, and it seems like it will be a pleasant trip. When they do not arrive at their destination, a search party is dispatched.

Their car is found at the side of the road, full of bullet holes, surrounded by the bodies of their guards. No sign of them, no indication as to where they've been taken or who has done this.

There is no shortage of suspects. The Queen has many enemies, some who have never forgiven her for the Possession and others who oppose her simple because she is Queen, most of whom would not hesitate to use her younger sister to strike at her. But time goes by and no demands are made, no credit is claimed, and hope of finding them dwindles. The search continues, its desperation tinged by increasing resignation.

They are found one week after they disappeared. A wounded man, babbling about magic and explosions and half out of his mind, is picked up wandering on the highway. He is backtracked to an underground stronghold, and there they find them.

No one who witnesses the scene ever forgets, much as they might wish to.

They will not move from the floor where they sit, surrounded by carnage, folded together into a tight ball, rolled against the world like a pillbug. They do not respond to their rescuers. They have to be sedated before they will let go of each other and are carried out unconscious. The medics must step over the bodies of their captors to reach them, their feet slipping in the blood on the floor.

* * *

His physical wounds are worse. Both wrists are sprained. The skin of his forearms has been all but flayed off. He's been beaten severely. There are cuts all over his chest, deep enough to hurt but not deep enough to kill. His back is ladder-crossed with bloody whip marks.

She is bruised, all over her body, but not cut. The Queen looks through the isolation window at her sister lying in bed and hears the news with a blank face.

They took turns at her. Too many to count. She is torn and bruised, yet she bears no defensive wounds. No broken fingers, no ripped fingernails.

The doctors are puzzled that she didn't fight. The Queen isn't. She has the explanation in the salt that is found in his wounds. She shuts her eyes but it doesn't shut out her horror. They bought her submission with his pain. They bought his destruction with her violation. They cut each of them the worst by hurting the other.

She watches her sister lie there. She does not go to her bedside. She tried, and was ignored. He sits with her, one hand clasped in hers and resting on her stomach, the other on her forehead. They look at nothing and no one but each other.

Neither has spoken a single word since their rescue. The questions of the Tin Men go unanswered. The heart-sight of a friend sees only blank darkness, his healing hands can mend flesh but not the spirit that animates it. The Queen's pleas for her sister to speak to her are unheard. She wishes once again that their mother was still alive…or that his son was.

* * *

He sits alone in the chamber where they were held, wishing that he still only had half a brain. Maybe it would only hurt half as much to see this room and have to imagine what was done to the people he loves as his own flesh and blood.

The bodies have been removed. All of them members of this still-unidentified group of insurgents, all of them missing heads. Not chopped off. Burst, from within, as it appears. He can't begin to imagine how it was done. She had to have done it, but he can't ask her. She doesn't speak, or even acknowledge that a question has been posed to her. He cannot imagine the breaking point she was driven to that her magic struck out to defend her in such a way. It is more accurate to say that he _can_ imagine it, but wishes he could not.

The shackles dangle from the pillory where he was bound. They are bloody, and he can see bits of his friend's skin stuck to the metal cuffs. The wood is smeared with blood, cracked down the middle as if by a mighty blow such as no human arm can deliver. He shuts his eyes and sees his friend's flayed forearms.

The other object in the room he can't bear to look at. He doesn't have to, he shuts his eyes and it is before him. Just an old mattress, nothing sinister, save the stains and the sparkle of salt crystals left by her tears.

He hasn't come alone, but his companion cannot enter. When he tries, he is overwhelmed. "They hurt them with love," he moans, before the residue of horror here chases him from the room.

He gets up. The photographs have been taken. The sketches have been made. The samples have been catalogued. There's just one thing left to do.

He lights a match, and tosses it into the gasoline with which he's drenched the place. He hears it go up as he leaves. He will leave the cavern and set off the explosives that will collapse it in on itself, burying it forever. Then he will rake the soil over the hole, salt the earth and hope that it buries the demons.

* * *

He won't leave her bedside. He doesn't show fatigue. She doesn't sleep. She just lies empty-eyed and looks at him. The doctors come and examine her, and neither of them acknowledge their presence. It is as if the rest of the world has gone away, there is nothing she can bear to look at but him, and nothing he can stand to acknowledge but her.

The doctors tell her that she can go back to her rooms now. Her wounds are healed, his are well on the way, only his bandaged forearms giving away his injuries. The Queen moves forward to assist her sister, some part of her knowing it is futile but wanting to make the gesture anyway.

He picks her up out of the bed, easily, as if she weighs nothing. It is almost the truth. She has lost substance, somehow, and seems frail as a dandelion puff. He walks calmly out of the infirmary, carrying her like a priceless treasure, carrying himself as if his own bones were made of spun sugar.

The Queen follows behind, their friends flanking her, no one speaking. He walks without looking right or left, going to her quarters and shutting the door in their faces.

* * *

Time passes. The Queen hears the reports of the men and women investigating this event which has shattered their peaceful little family like a hard hammer-blow to a block of ice. Everyone waits to hear that the men who took them were part of something huge and unimaginable evil, something beyond their comprehension, some fanatical splinter faction or doomsday cult led by a maniac. It is somehow more troubling that they turn out to have been ordinary rebels, disgruntled and hoping for notoriety. That something so mundane could have been so vile makes the world tilt on its axis.

The doors to her quarters remain closed. Food is left outside. Sometimes it is eaten, more often it is not. His quarters are abandoned.

The Queen sits outside her sister's bedroom door at night, sometimes for hours, straining to hear some sign of life. Sometimes she hears her sister sobbing. Sometimes she hears _him_ sobbing, and that is worse. She hears them talking in low voices, relieved that at least they speak to each other. And sometimes, she hears other sounds. The bed creaking, soft groans and muffled cries, choked voices, at times pleading and at other times commanding. She bites her fist to keep her own screams of frustration inside, wanting nothing but to see her sister's face, knowing that inside that room they are exorcising each other.

A week passes before they emerge. They speak to no one and are never apart. They walk the halls, their eyes on the floor. They do not join the family for meals. She looks marginally better, and his forearms are healed. Their hands are linked as if invisible shackles bind them together. Everyone watches them. Everyone leaves them in peace, not wishing to disturb what little of it they've reclaimed.

One day the Queen watches them from her balcony as they walk in the garden, arms about each other. He picks a rose from a bush and gives it to her. She stops and walks a few steps away, then she falls to her knees, and her sobs reach the Queen's ears even at this height. He kneels and gathers her to him and their embrace is as a path worn in a well-traveled field. She watches as they kiss tenderly, then falling into each other with obvious passion, and she is angry. Angry that she should finally see her sister kissing the man she's so long wished for her to love and feel not satisfaction or tenderness, but heartbreak and sorrow. Their kidnappers have taken the joy that should have been theirs upon coming together, and the joy that should have been hers to see them so.

* * *

The next day, they are gone.

She isn't surprised, not deep inside where truth hides. She has said it will take time, they will be as they were, but she's known that it isn't so. Her advisor, distraught at the loss of his friends, begs her to mount a search. What if they've been taken again? he says. But she knows they have gone on their own. They packed, and left their quarters tidy and empty.

She does not search. She does not wonder when she will see them again. She thinks it likely that she never will. She hopes they have found a faraway place, a safe place where there are no watching eyes.

Gradually, they are forgotten. People stop asking what happened. The stories stop appearing in the newspaper. The rumors and the speculation die down. The people go on with their lives, because the fate of one man and one woman, even as famous as they were, pales in comparison to the demands of the everyday.

She does not forget, nor do those who love them.

* * *

Five years pass in what feels like a heartbeat. The Queen bears her burdens with poise. She does not reveal how she misses her sister, or the man who would have been her brother. Her solitude is absolute, despite the valiant efforts by many eligible men to alleviate it.

She wishes only that she could have heard her sister's voice one last time before it was lost to her.

She does not show anyone the cards.

They began arriving a year after their departure. They come every few months. A blank notecard, in an envelope with no return address. Inside, a photo of a little girl, first as an infant, and bigger with each new card. The most recent sent her to her room for an hour, where she cried over the image of the girl's smile. She has her mother's eyes and her father's dimples, and the Queen touches the face of her niece and weeps for what has been stolen.

She nurtures a careful hope that she will see them again, that she will hold this child and hear her sister's voice.

Today, she receives a new card. When she opens it and draws out the photo, she falls to her knees at the sight not of the child, as expected, but of a family. The girl cuddled between her parents, her father's face lowered into her dark curls, her mother leaning her forehead against his brow. She touches the image of her sister's lips; they are curled into a smile.

She flips the photo, as always hoping for a written message. There has never been one, until today. It is only one word, but it is enough.

_Soon._


End file.
